“We can’t. Remember? The place is shut down.”
“Oh, yeah. I forgot. Anyway, here’s another one. This one isn’t as clear as the other two. I’ve got a theory about what they’re trying to say, but I’ll wait until you’ve gotten an earful before I say anything.”
“All right.” I jumped as Tiggy grabbed my ankle and began to scale me like a scratching post. I pulled her into my lap and stroked the back of her head until she purred. “Hit it.”
“This one we recorded after you said, ‘So Green Eyes is gone, and now you’re all awake.’ There seemed to be some confusion. You said there was more than one of them.”
“That’s right. They were talking among themselves, but I couldn’t tell what they were saying.”
“Give this one a listen.”
He leaned over to the left so I had a better view of the screen. The wavering line in the black rectangle swung frantically when my own voice said, ‘…you’re all awake,’ went still for a second or two, and then jolted again.
It sounded short and sharp—two jagged syllables that began with a “b” and closed with an “n.”
B—n.
A few moments later, a second, quieter voice chimed in with something equally dim.
Fen—vrrr.
The line quit bouncing and trailed to a slim horizontal slice.
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
Benny didn’t answer, but he tapped the play button again.
B—n…fen—vrrr.
I stopped petting the kitten, who was on the cusp of a nap anyway and didn’t mind. “I can’t understand that at all. You said you had a theory, though?”
“Listen again. Come on—listen hard.” He turned the speaker up another notch, just about as far as it went. “One more time.”
On a third listen, I thought I heard a vowel in the first word, but I couldn’t swear to it; and the second part sounded a little like the word “fender,” but that didn’t make any sense either.
I shook my head. “Sorry, Ben. I can’t make heads or tails out of it.”
He swiveled on the piano stool and faced me. He bit his lower lip and looked back at the screen. “Okay, so I lied. I can’t make it out either. I was hoping you’d be able to pin it down.”
“Nope. Try another one. What else have you got on there?”
“A couple more. Hang on.” A few more tabs and adjustments later, and the box was ready to play. “This one came before you said, ‘Do you agree with this guy?’ You’ll hear yourself towards the end, but right before that there’s a couple of whispers that overlap. I think it’s two voices, or that’s how it sounds to me. I spent a lot of time cleaning this one up, but part of it is still pretty fuzzy.”
“That’s all right. Let ’er rip.”
“Here it goes. Okay.”
Ey…ereagain…ows…
I heard the rest of it the way Benny suggested, like a second voice was speaking at the same time.
Iah…ows
At which point my own overly loud words kicked in. Benny played the segment back a couple of times, and on the third hearing I was pretty sure about the first part. “I think the first few words are, ‘They’re here again.’”
“Good. That’s how I heard it too. What about the rest of it? That second part that comes in midway—what about that?”
“That part I’m not so positive about. The second word sounds like ‘outs,’ sort of. And the first word is maybe ‘I,’ but I don’t know.”
As Benny ran the clip again, both of us strained our ears towards the speakers.
They’re here again…outs…I…outs
“I don’t think it’s ‘outs,’” I confessed. “It must be something else. What do you make of that ‘I’ sound?”
“It sounds to me like ‘dire,’ the way a bad situation is ‘dire,’ you know? Or maybe it’s ‘tire,’ like they’re ‘tired.’ You said something about them being awake—maybe they were telling you that yeah, they’re awake—but they’re tired.”
“Do dead people get tired?”“You tell me.”
“I can’t. Put it through one more time.”
He obliged with a flick of his finger.
“Dire,” I said aloud, and the word fit as well as anything else. “Tire.” Said quickly, even by the living, the two words would be hard to distinguish. The consonants were close phonetic cousins to be so far apart in the alphabet. “Something is dire. No. No, wait a minute. Have you got a newspaper?”
“Um,” he looked around the minimalist clutter of the living room and then told me to wait. He slipped a pair of sandals on his feet and darted out the front door. Tiggy raised her head when he turned the knob, but she didn’t bolt. My lap was warm enough to hold her until he returned, paper in hand.
“My neighbor’s,” he explained. “They’re out of town and they won’t be back until tomorrow anyway. They’ll never know the difference.”
On the front page, beneath the red rubber band that held the wad together, the paper announced, “Shooting at Chickamauga Battlefield.”
“It made the front page,” he observed.
“I know. Dave was reading about it this morning, I think. He mentioned it.” I snapped the rubber band free and unrolled the fat bulk of paper. “He mentioned a place. A name. There.”
I dropped my finger down onto the print, just below a follow-up story on a missing person case.
Benny adjusted his glasses and peered closely at the paragraph indicated. “Near the cabin at Dyer’s field,” he read.
“And what’s another word for cabin? ‘House.’ I think that the missing word is ‘house.’”
He abandoned the paper to me, and Tiggy abandoned my lap because it wasn’t big enough to hold both her and the Times Free Press. I kept reading until I heard the recording buzz over the speakers.
They’re here again…house…Dyer house.
“I think you’re right. So, roughly—‘They’re here again at the Dyer house.’ Who’s here again?”
I waved the front page at him.
“The Marshalls. Last night was their third night of investigation; and the shots were fired while they were on the road—the one that runs alongside Dyer’s field.”
“Ah.” Benny grinned. “Which, one might assume, is where the Dyer’s house is located. You think the ghosts were trying to warn us?”
I grunted a negative. “Warn us? I doubt it. The Dyer house is a ways off from where we were. I remember those two ghosts now, and how they were talking to each other. I think they were just exchanging information between themselves. The one dead guy was telling the other dead guy, ‘Hey, those nuts are back, over by the house.’ And the other one says, as if to clarify, ‘The Dyer house.’ That’s more logical than anything we’ve gotten so far, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely. Much more logical than, ‘The bargain was up.’ What does that mean, anyway? If it wasn’t so clear I’d think we must’ve misheard it. But that’s what it says, plain as can be.”
“God only knows. Was that all of it, or is there more?”
“That’s all of it.”
Benny toyed with the computer while I quickly scanned the rest of the article, reading key parts out loud.
“It says that one bullet landed in a cameraman. Or an assistant. One of their people, anyway. The other two or three shots—they don’t seem to know how many were fired—either went wild or hit trees.”
“Did the guy die?”
“No, he lived. He’ll be okay. He took it in the shoulder, through his back,” I continued. “‘The identity of the shooter is not known, nor is any motive suspected.’”
“Huh.” Benny pressed a button, and the computer’s CD tray extended. With two fingers he lifted the disc out and slipped it into a sleeve; then he put the sleeve into a case on the bookshelf. “That’s interesting, but not real helpful. We’re going to need to go back.”
“I agree. When? And under what conditions? Have you got any suggestions?”
He swiveled in the stool and leaned his back up against the desk. “Since it’s still closed, we’ll have to go at night, obviously.”
“We should pick a different trespassing point. Something closer to Dyer’s field. Can we do that?”
“I don’t know. But I can find out. Let me blow some time on the Internet this afternoon before I go to work. I’m betting I can score us some maps or directions or something, unless you’d rather do the honors.”
“You can do it—or get Jamie to look it up with you. You guys know the area a lot better than I do. You get us directions, and I’ll get us supplies. Equipment. Whatever we need.”
“Be careful what you offer. You could end up spending thousands of dollars,” he warned, but I spied the gleam in his eyes. I didn’t have thousands of dollars to throw at the project, but I could throw a few hundred at it without starving; and the prospect of a proper investigation would keep Benny on board indefinitely, which pleased me.
“For starters, I was thinking we could pick up some infrared film. I don’t know if Dave has any good filters for working with IR, but it’ll probably give us some extra image information in the dark all the same. The pictures might not be as clear as they’d be in the daytime, but they’ll be a heck of a lot better than snapping shots in the dark without a flash.”
“What will they look like? Like crazy negatives? Like, black and white?”
I shrugged. “It’ll depend on whether or not Dave’s got color filters and if I remember how to use them properly. Anyway, we may not want to get too close to the Dyer house if there’s shooting around there, but I’ll borrow one of his good cameras with a telephoto lens—and we’ll be able to spy like the pros.”